Now, the question is: Is this useful? Do you think it's just a half-assed gradient mesh or is it something that extends the artistic tools available in Inkscape?

My IMHO is that while this is nice and cool, it would not be very useful in my design work. I think that the important thing is to get the essentials right, and then users can build their own complex things from these essentialas. With regard to gradients, here's what is still glaringly missing:

- elliptic gradients (that can be rotated, with both axes adjustable)

- non-linear gradient functions (currently all gradients are linear, which often looks too crude and artificial)

- on-canvas editing of gradients

When these things are done, I will be almost happy. It will be relatively easy then to emulate most meshes, fields, etc. by overlaying semitransparent elliptic gradients.

What would satisfy 100% of my gradient needs is stroke patterns, i.e. the ability to paint a stroke with repeated copies of objects. I would then take a circle with circular transparency gradient and repeat it along a path, to receive a blurred stroke that can be given any shape and combined with other blurred strokes for any gradient-mesh-like effects. Besides stroke patterns, this also requires fixing this bug:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=859579&grou...

Still another alternative is a support of SVG filters, most importanly gaussian blur. If you can take arbitrary shapes and blur them into transparency, then again, it'll cover most uses of gradient meshes, and will potentially be more convenient.

This is just an IMHO. Others may love to have the gradient meshes in Inkscape and will find unique uses for them, but I'm speaking from my design experience.

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